Sunday, November 25, 2012

The Mainstream Media's Trivial Pursuit of Campaign 2012 | The Nation

The Mainstream Media's Trivial Pursuit of Campaign 2012 | The Nation

The problems are myriad and often difficult to disentangle, but two of them are most salient. First is the role that the relentless focus on campaign trivia plays in the coverage. Save fundraising, which is usually done privately, nothing much happens for most of the time that reporters are assigned to cover campaigns. The result is that most end up filing stories so trivial and ultimately meaningless it’s hard to imagine that even their authors could today defend their relevance or significance. Oftentimes, such stories are justified as investigations into “character” and resemble entertainment reporting. Later on in the process, the reporters tend to tie themselves to horse race coverage and focus alternately on the internal processes of the campaigns or the temporary state of the polls, calling to mind the sports pages. Then again, quite a few campaign stories are simply stupid and unrelated to almost anything.